Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are increasingly common in today’s digital world. However, they rarely make daily headlines thanks to the effectiveness of mitigation services like DigiCert’s UltraDDoS Protect, which work quietly to stop threats before they cause major disruptions.
DDoS attacks overwhelm their targets by flooding them with excessive network traffic, rendering critical services inaccessible to legitimate users. Attackers often exploit network vulnerabilities, using botnets—large networks of compromised devices—or amplification tools to dramatically increase traffic volume. The consequences go beyond temporary outages. Businesses can face significant financial losses, damage to their reputation, and erosion of customer trust. Without strong defenses, the fallout from these attacks can be catastrophic.
While we deploy many countermeasures to protect our customers, one that we rely on frequently is Total Traffic. This countermeasure plays a pivotal role in defending against attacks, and its consistent presence in our monthly reports emphasizes its importance. In fact, Total Traffic is almost always the most common attack vector we encounter. For instance, in DigiCert’s DDoS Trends Report covering the first half of 2025, we mitigated a staggering 15,260 total attacks, with 42.94% of those being Total Traffic Attacks. This underscores its significance as a critical first line of defense in combating such threats. Its dominance was particularly evident during peak attack periods, surpassing 50% of all attacks in both April and June. These figures highlight how Total Traffic effectively captures and mitigates a wide variety of volumetric attacks, offering vital protection across a broad spectrum of scenarios.
This post will explain what the Total Traffic countermeasure is, how it functions within DDoS mitigation platforms like Vercara UltraDDoS Protect, and explore the types of attacks it commonly intercepts. By understanding this essential defensive layer, businesses can better appreciate the dynamics of modern DDoS protection and strengthen their security posture.
What is the Total Traffic DDoS Countermeasure?
The Total Traffic countermeasure is a critical security mechanism specifically engineered to detect and mitigate a diverse array of flood-based Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. It operates as a comprehensive, overarching defense that activates when the cumulative volume of incoming traffic directed at a network or a specific host surpasses a predetermined and acceptable threshold. This countermeasure is not limited to identifying particular attack signatures or protocol anomalies; instead, it concentrates on the aggregated traffic flow, providing a robust layer of protection against various forms of volumetric assaults. For instance, UltraDDoS Protect, Vercara’s advanced DDoS mitigation solution, employs several techniques to meticulously establish a baseline of normal traffic patterns unique to each customer’s network.
This baseline is established and continuously adjusted, ensuring accuracy and relevance to the network’s typical operational state. When an abrupt and substantial surge in traffic significantly deviates from this established baseline, the Total Traffic countermeasure is immediately triggered, initiating protective actions to safeguard the targeted assets. This proactive approach ensures that even previously unseen attack vectors that rely on overwhelming traffic volumes are effectively addressed, maintaining the availability and performance of critical online services.
How Does a Total Traffic DDoS Occur?
A Total Traffic event is initiated when a sophisticated DDoS mitigation system, such as Vercara’s UltraDDoS Protect, identifies a dangerous and abnormal surge in network traffic that far exceeds typical operational levels. The process is rooted in continuous, vigilant monitoring and advanced behavioral analysis, ensuring that even subtle shifts in traffic patterns are detected.
- Baseline Establishment: The system’s initial and crucial step involves meticulously learning and establishing what constitutes “normal” traffic for a particular organization. This isn’t a static definition; rather, it’s a dynamic and intelligent baseline built upon the analysis of extensive historical data. The system thoroughly examines typical traffic volumes, recurrent patterns, and the specific types of traffic that traverse the network on a day-to-day, week-to-week, and even month-to-month basis, accounting for peak and off-peak hours, special events, and regular business operations.
- Threshold Setting: Building upon this robust baseline, network administrators, often collaborating closely with cybersecurity experts, proceed to set specific and granular thresholds for traffic volume. These thresholds are not arbitrary; they meticulously represent the maximum amount of traffic the network infrastructure can handle efficiently without experiencing any performance degradation, latency issues, or, critically, complete service outages. These thresholds are designed to be proactive indicators of potential overload.
- Deviation Detection: With the baseline and thresholds firmly in place, the system constantly and rigorously compares the real-time, incoming traffic flow against both the established normal baseline and the predefined thresholds. A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack is characterized by a dramatic, sudden, and often overwhelming increase in traffic. This creates a significant and unmistakable deviation from the expected patterns, triggering immediate alerts within the system.
- Countermeasure Activation: The moment the incoming traffic volume surpasses the meticulously configured threshold, the Total Traffic countermeasure is automatically and instantaneously triggered. Upon activation, the system swiftly reroutes the anomalous and potentially malicious traffic to a specialized scrubbing center. Within this secure environment, advanced filtering mechanisms are employed to meticulously identify and remove malicious packets, allowing only legitimate, clean traffic to proceed unhindered to its intended destination.
This multi-layered and dynamic mechanism ensures that any significant, unexpected, and potentially overwhelming flood of traffic is immediately and effectively addressed, thus comprehensively protecting the network and its critical assets from being compromised or rendered inaccessible by an attack.
Common Examples of Total Traffic DDoS Attacks
The Total Traffic countermeasure is versatile and can be triggered by various types of volumetric DDoS attacks. While it serves as a catch-all for most types of traffic, two attack types are particularly prominent examples: carpet bombing and DDoS amplification attacks.
Carpet Bombing Attacks
A carpet bombing attack is a sophisticated DDoS technique where attackers distribute malicious traffic across a wide range of IP addresses within a target network, rather than concentrating on a single destination. This approach presents several challenges for traditional DDoS mitigation tools that monitor traffic on a per-host basis. Because the attack volume directed at any single IP address may remain below the alert threshold, or the attack may cycle rapidly through destination addresses, it can make mitigation harder by forcing security teams to onboard more IP addresses and network blocks into mitigation. It also makes mitigation more difficult by cycling through targets faster than the normal sample-and-block interval, and can overwhelm a Security Operations Center (SOC) with alerts and tickets, causing them to miss other critical events.
The primary goals of a carpet bombing attack are:
Complicate Mitigation Onboarding: Attackers can spread their assault across a wide range of target IP addresses, forcing the victim to onboard and mitigate a significantly larger number of network objects. This tactic increases the complexity of the response process, making it harder for the target organization to focus their defensive efforts effectively.
Overload Mitigation Resources: By pushing the target organization to simultaneously inspect and divert traffic across thousands of IP addresses, attackers can put a tremendous strain on security appliances. This can lead to bottlenecks or, in worst cases, the complete exhaustion of the organization’s mitigation tools, leaving them vulnerable to further attacks.
Exhaust SOC Resources: Flooding the Security Operations Center (SOC) with a high volume of alerts and tickets creates a chaotic environment. This overwhelm not only distracts SOC teams from addressing other ongoing critical security threats but also delays their ability to discern genuine risks from noise, increasing the chances of successful exploitation.
While Vercara’s DDoS Trends Report noted a significant decrease in carpet bombing attacks in the first half of 2025 compared to the previous year, they still constitute a meaningful portion of volumetric threats and are a prime example of an attack identified by the Total Traffic countermeasure. Advanced DDoS protection services use network-wide analysis to detect these distributed attacks by monitoring the total traffic volume across all managed objects.
DDoS Amplification Attacks
DDoS amplification is a method where attackers use misconfigured or vulnerable third-party servers to magnify the volume of their attack traffic. The attacker sends a small request to a server (like DNS, NTP, or Memcached) but spoofs the source IP address to be that of the intended victim. The server then sends a much larger response to the victim’s IP address.
The result is a massive flood of unsolicited traffic that quickly consumes the victim’s bandwidth. Because the traffic originates from legitimate, albeit exploited, servers, it can be difficult to distinguish from normal traffic without sophisticated analysis.
Key characteristics of amplification attacks include:
High Volume: Attackers can achieve massive traffic volumes, with some attacks reaching multiple terabits per second (Tbps). For instance, in mid-2025, DigiCert protected its customers against several attacks that peaked at 3.7 Tbps.
Evasion and Anonymity: Attackers can obscure their true origin by leveraging third-party servers, thereby making it significantly harder to trace the attack back to its source and accurately identify the malicious actors. This anonymity is a key advantage for attackers, as it complicates defensive efforts and forensic investigations.
The Total Traffic countermeasure is highly effective against amplification attacks because it focuses on the resulting surge in inbound traffic volume, regardless of its source or specific protocol.
Other Large DDoS Attacks
As cybercriminals adopt new techniques to construct and deploy increasingly larger botnets, the volume of attack traffic they are capable of generating grows substantially. This evolution not only amplifies the magnitude of sustained attack traffic, leading to prolonged periods of service disruption, but also enhances their ability to initiate massive bursts of DDoS traffic in a short period, overwhelming defenses almost instantly. The Total Traffic countermeasure serves as a critical defense mechanism against such large-scale and sophisticated attacks. Its effectiveness lies in its ability to identify and mitigate a wide range of attack vectors by focusing on abnormal surges in traffic volume, irrespective of the specific methodologies or protocols employed by the attackers. This adaptive and comprehensive approach ensures robust protection against the escalating sophistication and sheer power of modern DDoS threats, safeguarding critical online services and infrastructure.
The Impact of Total Traffic on Your Business
A successful DDoS attack, whether it’s a carpet bombing campaign, an amplification attack, can have severe consequences for a business. The primary impact is service unavailability, which directly affects customers, partners, and employees.
Operational Disruption
When a network is overwhelmed, legitimate users cannot access critical services like websites, applications, or APIs, resulting in significant consequences. Businesses such as e-commerce sites and streaming services face revenue loss as downtime directly impacts sales. Internal systems also become inaccessible, leading to productivity loss as employees are unable to perform their duties, disrupting core operations. Furthermore, customer frustration grows as inaccessible services damage trust and satisfaction. Research shows that 71% of people with disabilities will leave a website that is not accessible, a principle that applies to all users experiencing service outages.
Financial Costs
The financial impact of a DDoS attack extends beyond immediate revenue loss. Mitigation efforts often necessitate emergency IT resources, including overtime for staff and engagement of third-party services. Furthermore, public-facing outages can severely damage brand credibility and customer loyalty, requiring substantial time and marketing investment to rectify. Attackers also increasingly leverage DDoS threats for extortion.
Security Vulnerabilities and Exploitation
DDoS attacks are frequently employed as a deceptive maneuver, serving as a smokescreen to divert the attention of security teams. While IT personnel are engaged in efforts to restore service and mitigate the immediate impact of the attack, threat actors can exploit this distraction to conduct other malicious activities. Such activities may include launching sophisticated phishing campaigns targeting employees, thoroughly probing network infrastructure for previously undetected weaknesses, or executing surreptitious data breaches designed to exfiltrate sensitive information. The dual nature of these attacks—disruption coupled with covert exploitation—underscores their complexity and the extensive damage they can inflict beyond simple service unavailability.
Preventing Total Traffic Attacks
Given the high stakes, a proactive and multi-layered approach to DDoS defense is essential. Relying solely on reactive measures is insufficient in today’s threat environment.
Configure Your Network for Resilience
Beyond relying solely on external mitigation services, a robust network architecture provides an essential, internal layer of defense. A key strategy involves minimizing your attack surface by carefully limiting the number of public-facing endpoints and services that can be targeted. Furthermore, distributing incoming traffic effectively is paramount; employing load balancing techniques can spread user requests across multiple datacenters and servers, preventing any single server from becoming a bottleneck during peak legitimate traffic or the initial stages of an attack. Similarly, Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) can absorb significant volumes of traffic and cache content closer to users, thus reducing the load on your origin servers and effectively mitigating smaller, less sophisticated DDoS attacks. Web Application Firewalls (WAFs) are core protection against more advanced DDoS threats, specifically application-layer (Layer 7) attacks which target particular functionalities within your web applications rather than just overwhelming network bandwidth. WAFs can inspect HTTP/HTTPS traffic, identify malicious patterns, and block requests that exhibit characteristics of an application-layer attack, thereby safeguarding your most vulnerable application components.
Develop an Incident Response Plan
No defense is impenetrable. Having a well-defined incident response plan is critical for minimizing the impact of an attack. This plan should outline key personnel with clearly defined roles and responsibilities for the security team, IT staff, and executive leadership. It should also include a communication strategy to establish protocols for communicating with employees, customers, and stakeholders during an outage, and escalation procedures that detail the steps for engaging your DDoS mitigation provider and other third-party vendors. Finally, the plan should incorporate a post-mortem analysis to be conducted after an incident to identify lessons learned and improve your defensive posture.
Use a DDoS Mitigation Service
Implementing a dedicated DDoS mitigation service is one of the most effective ways to protect against large-scale volumetric attacks, and partnering with a specialized provider like DigiCert can make all the difference. A cloud-based, always-on DDoS mitigation service offers key benefits. First, it provides scalability, with the massive bandwidth and infrastructure needed to absorb and scrub even the largest attacks, far beyond what a typical organization can manage. Second, it brings expertise, offering access to a team of security professionals who monitor threats 24/7 and handle the mitigation process for you. Finally, advanced detection capabilities, such as those provided by solutions like UltraDDoS Protect, leverage sophisticated behavioral analysis and global threat intelligence to detect and neutralize attacks before they can impact your network.
A Final Word on DDoS Defense
The Total Traffic countermeasure is a fundamental component of modern DDoS defense, serving as an essential safety net for detecting and mitigating a wide range of volumetric attacks. Its frequent activation in threat reports is a testament to the ongoing prevalence of flood-based attacks like carpet bombing and DDoS amplification.
As the number and intensity of DDoS attacks continue to grow, a reactive or purely on-premises defense strategy is no longer viable. A proactive, cloud-based, and expertly managed DDoS mitigation solution is essential for protecting your business from the operational disruption, financial loss, and reputational damage these attacks cause.
By understanding how countermeasures like Total Traffic work and implementing a robust, multi-layered defense strategy, you can ensure your organization remains resilient in the face of evolving cyber threats.
How DigiCert Can Help
DigiCert’s UltraDDoS Protect is a purpose-built solution designed to defend against the full spectrum of DDoS attacks, including those detected by the Total Traffic countermeasure. Delivered as a cloud-based, white-glove service, it provides immediate and comprehensive protection for all your digital assets.
Our approach combines state-of-the-art technology with deep security expertise and a proactive stance against evolving threats:
Behavioral and Algorithmic Detection: We go beyond simple signature matching, which can be easily circumvented by sophisticated attackers, to analyze traffic patterns and identify anomalous behavior indicative of a DDoS attack. This includes detecting subtle shifts in traffic volume, source addresses, and connection rates that signal malicious intent, even if the attack traffic itself is disguised.
Massive Mitigation Capacity: Our global network is architected with the scale to absorb and scrub even the largest multi-terabit-per-second attacks. This extensive capacity ensures that your services remain available and responsive to legitimate users, even under the most severe assault, preventing service degradation or outages.
Global Threat Intelligence: We leverage real-time intelligence gathered from a vast network of sensors and partnerships across the internet. This allows us to identify and block known attackers, botnets, and malicious IP addresses before they ever reach your infrastructure, providing a crucial layer of preemptive defense.
Expert Management: Our 24/7 Security Operations Center (SOC) is staffed by highly trained DDoS experts. These specialists manage the entire mitigation process, from the moment an attack is detected through its full resolution. This comprehensive “white-glove” service frees your internal teams to focus on core business objectives, confident that your defenses are in expert hands.
Protect your organization from the growing threat of DDoS attacks with our industry-leading solutions. Reach out to our team of experts to discuss how we can safeguard your critical infrastructure and ensure uninterrupted business operations.
